Vehicle-body accessories are installed on vehicles for a variety of aesthetic and functional reasons. Examples of vehicle-body accessories include fender flares, body cladding, rails, ground effects, spoilers, stone guards, accent members, and other members attached to a vehicle body for aesthetic and/or functional reasons. Vehicle-body accessories may be installed by a vehicle manufacturer, for example as part of the original design of a vehicle, or they may be installed aftermarket as a customization of a vehicle.
Vehicle-body accessories may be designed and configured to be installed using adhesive material (e.g., glue or double-sided adhesive tape), using other mechanical fasteners (e.g., bolts, clips, screws), or using some combination of more than one coupling mechanism. One drawback to using adhesive material in general to install known vehicle-body accessories is the difficulty in properly positioning the vehicle-body accessory on the corresponding vehicle body without alignment mistakes and waste of adhesive material during such mistakes. One drawback to using double-sided adhesive tape to install known vehicle-body accessories is the tendency for the tape to completely detach from either the vehicle body or the vehicle-body accessory after only a portion of the tape has begun to detach, simply due to the weight of the vehicle-body accessory and/or the relative movement between the vehicle-body accessory and the vehicle body (e.g., due to vibrations and other inputs resulting from typical vehicle usage). In other words, once a portion of the tape has detached, the detachment has a tendency to propagate the full length of the tape, resulting in the vehicle-body accessory detaching from the vehicle body.